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I believe that for all intents and purposes, once a hard drive has been wiped it is probably too far gone to retrieve a worthwhile amount of data, by anyone. If you're paranoid use killdisk* or related software.

Another open source project. Also called "Darik's Boot & Nuke", it is available as a self booting application for CD, DVD, floppy and USB drives.

In my opinion, you need to wipe a drive externally to be certain that everything is wiped.

I use DBAN with a simple zero overwrite before doing reinstalls/ghosts. In the old days there was an option in DOS to overwrite in this way (it actually overwrote with a pattern, rather than 0 or 1). With Vista, if you select a full format it will overwrite the drive with 0.

Other versions of Windows do not do this.

The reason that I do this is to make sure that I have a level playing field, and by writing to all of the drive I will get errors if it is damaged

The advantage of DBAN is that it will work with operating systems other than Windows, as it is self-contained

And just to lay some myths to rest:

There is no such thing as a "low level reformat" of a modern hard drive. This can only be done at the factory.

The Gutmann 35 pass wiping isn't what people think. I think that the maximum is around 17 passes. The others are to cover drive formats that might not be recognised, and applies to old technology.